


Lazarus, come from the dead

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:10:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4710491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They hit the water, and they drown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lazarus, come from the dead

Together, they fall.

They almost part on the way down—Will’s bad arm gives way, gravity dragging them apart—but Hannibal keeps a deadly grip on him, as if he were not both stabbed and shot, as if he were the devil the world believes him to be. Will knows better. He relaxes in Hannibal’s grasp, given over utterly.  
  
They hit the water, and they drown.

*  
  
The pendulum swings; the universe reverses itself.  
  
I eviscerate Francis Dolarhyde with one efficient stab to his gut. It is not the fate I would have chosen for him. It was self-defense, up to a point. Now it is murder. My co-conspirator tears out Dolarhyde’s throat with his teeth. Together, we watch the blood fountain out.  
  
I do not regret Dolarhyde’s death. Killing him has been the most singular experience of my life. I feel righteous, and powerful. My conscience is clear. I see everything with a startling clarity. It is beautiful.  
  
I embrace Hannibal Lecter. I am grateful to him for helping me to see. I am grateful to him for the advice he gave me: save yourself, kill them all. I will save myself. I will kill them all. Lecter loves me. He returns my embrace, relaxing for just one moment. That moment is all I need.  
  
I keep my grip on Lecter, and take us both over the edge of the bluff, to the waiting black water.  
  
This is my design.  
  
*  
  
Will opens his eyes in the chambers of the sea, cold and confused, and sucks in water. He’s disoriented—can’t tell where the surface is—but his fingers brush human skin. Hannibal. He grips hard, kicks wildly, and then he’s coughing into the night, his ears ringing, his body numb, although the pain will surely come soon. Hannibal is limp against him; his head keeps slipping back into the water while Will tows him to the nearest rock. 

Hannibal looks quite dead, laid out on the dark rock. His blood is black, his face as pale as the moon. Will is reminded, terribly, of Cassie Boyle, the blackbirds settling down on her white body. He fumbles for Hannibal’s pulse, can’t find it.

His training takes over, and he performs CPR mindlessly, efficiently, trying not to jar the wound in Hannibal’s side. After an agonizing minute Hannibal twitches, vomits salt water. Will lets his hand slip down to the bullet wound, applying useless pressure.  
  
“Trying to save my life, now?” Hannibal says, voice thin and rasping with pain.  
  
“I killed you already,” Will tells him, heart pounding with the honesty of it.

“You changed me,” Hannibal corrects him with an awful wet gasp, and that is the truth too.

*

  
The shattered edges of the cup fit back together; the universe reorders itself.

I hack into the back of Francis Dolarhyde’s knee with an axe, slicing through tendon and into bone. This is not how I would like to kill him. I do this for survival, my own and Will Graham’s. I am in considerable pain, but the adrenaline will see me through. I leap onto Dolarhyde’s back, using the injury against him, forcing apart his arms. I meet Will’s eyes, and confirm what I already know: we share this. We have never been more alive than we are in this moment. He deals the fatal blow, as is only proper, with his hands. In almost the same instant, I rip into Dolarhyde’s throat with my teeth. We have become raw, base, neither human nor animal, the most essential versions of ourselves. If I have experienced such joy before, I no longer remember it.  
  
I help Will to stand; I cannot stop my voice from shaking. This is all I wanted for him, for us both. I don’t care to see past this moment. The future I willingly put into his keeping.  
  
This is my design.  
  
*

Hannibal directs Will through his own surgery, conducted in the back of a stolen ambulance. His words slur, and sometimes he slips from English to French, to languages Will does not know, but Will’s hands remain steady. “What next?” he asks, implacable, and Hannibal swallows and replies with the proper instruction, his free hand clenching at the air. When it’s done—and not before—Hannibal faints dead away. Will doesn’t bother stitching up his face in the ambulance; it’s already been missing too long, and his face can wait. He sticks Hannibal in a wheelchair, retrieves a hoodie from an unconscious EMT, and ditches the ambulance.

An hour later finds them in a Motel 6, Hannibal asleep on the single bed. Will leans into the stale bathroom counter, only lightly drugged, winding black thread in and out of the cut in his cheek. He’s beyond exhaustion, into the dreamy disconnect where thought and action detach, but no visions come to him. He has not seen the stag in years, or the murky figure he always knew to be the Chesapeake Ripper. He sees only Hannibal, the moonlight slicing through the blinds to land on his bloodstained face.  
  
Will ties off his stitches and wrings out the washcloth. He soaks one end in warm water and stumbles over to the bed. Hannibal’s eyelids twitch, but he does not open them as Will very carefully scrubs the dried blood away from his mouth.

“Lie down,” Hannibal instructs, before Will finishes. The bathroom light is still on, and the cloth is damp in his hand, but Will lies down anyway. His knees brush Hannibal’s leg, one curled hand just barely touching Hannibal’s rib cage. “Close your eyes,” Hannibal continues, and Will does, the world narrowing to the slight heat of the body at his side and the cool of the room around him.  
  
“Are you done denying me?” Hannibal asks, when Will is almost asleep. It’s just a question. There’s no emotion at all behind the words.  
  
“Yes,” Will replies, because he knows he has drained the reservoir of his strength. There will be no more self-negation, no more denial at all.  
  
There’s a long exhale beside him in the dark, and a slight return of pressure against his hand. “Sleep, Will.”

Will sleeps, and does not dream.  
  
*

This is how the evidence must be interpreted: the attack on Will Graham’s family pushed him too far. He colluded with Lecter to kill the Tooth Fairy, and convinced Crawford that the only way to catch Dolarhyde was with Lecter’s help. (This is the nail in Crawford’s career. Bloom fled the country. There are people saying he should, too.) Dolarhyde shot Lecter, set up a camera. The only footage the camera captured was Lecter, bleeding on the floor, and the one intense look he gives to someone beyond the camera: Graham. The audio picks up the sounds of a struggle, and muffled voices under the crashing of the surf. The experts weigh in: determine they were certainly working together. Together, Graham and Lecter killed the Tooth Fairy. When they were done, either Graham or Lecter pushed the other over the cliff.

Dr. Chilton’s book proposes it was Lecter. Tattlecrime insists it was Graham. Crawford is suspicious, although of course his word hardly counts. (How could it have been a murder/suicide, Jack wants to know. It fits neither his profile of Will nor his profile of Hannibal.) At that height, falling into water is like falling into concrete.There is no way they could have survived the fall.  
  
*

They heal, very slowly. Will’s face scars quite horribly, a pink and raised keloid. His shoulder aches all the time, even through the scar tissue. Hannibal has a second surgery, at a hospital this time. He broke his shin when they hit the water, and that too requires a surgery. He is consigned to a wheelchair until he heals, which he is bearing with more grace than Will would have under the circumstances.

They have been declared dead. This is, of course, convenient. 

Their home base is not quite up to Hannibal’s standards—or up to the new ones Will has made, over the last three years. It’s just a place to stay, to recuperate, an apartment barely big enough for the both of them to share. But it has a view of the water, which Hannibal declared essential, and an elevator for the wheelchair.  
  
“Do you miss your son?” Hannibal asks him one morning at the breakfast table, almost a month after their deaths. Steam from the coffee Will made him is curling up from between his hands. He is not looking down at the coffee, or out the window to the sea. He’s looking right at Will, trying as always to peer inside his head.  
  
“Very much,” Will tells him. He gets up, pours himself a second cup. He is beyond many things, but not beyond his urge to deflect.  
  
“And your wife?” Hannibal asks, his head tilting very slightly to one side, snakelike. “I had noticed that you still wear your wedding ring.”  
  
“I’m still married,” Will says, deliberately mild. “Technically.”  
  
Hannibal grabs his wrist as Will passes, stilling him. It’s his left wrist, and Hannibal’s hand slips down immediately to thumb at Will’s ring, half a caress and half a threat. “You didn’t answer my question,” Hannibal reminds him, in an equally mild voice.  
  
Will sips his coffee with his free hand. “She’s my wife. Of course I miss her.”  
  
Hannibal’s fingers tighten. “I would still like to meet your Molly Graham,” he says, and there’s a little flash of satisfaction in his gaze when he catches the crawling horror Will can’t hide from him. “I think I’d very much enjoy eating her heart.”

Will swallows his horror, returns it to his gut where it belongs. “You don’t need to be jealous,” he says instead. “I miss Abigail, too. I miss Beverly.” He puts down his coffee, draws his hand away from Hannibal, and works the ring off with two brusque twists. Hannibal goes quite still.

He drops it in Hannibal’s still-open palm.

“Don’t threaten Molly or Walter again,” Will says softly.  
  
Hannibal’s hand closes over the ring. “Never again while I live,” Hannibal promises, and the hair on the back of Will’s neck raises.  
  
*

Molly Graham is legally declared a widow. She pays for a headstone in the same cemetery that holds Abigail Hobbs, although the graves are not close. The headstone reads: William Graham Jr. 1975 – 2015. Beloved Husband and Father. There is no funeral, but Freddie Lounds comes to photograph the red spray of flowers left at the grave, and she upturns a fifth of whiskey into the empty earth.

No one pays for Hannibal Lecter’s headstone, but Lady Murasaki receives a visitor in Paris, a girl she hasn’t seen for many long years, come to tell her the news is true. There is no place left for Hannibal in the world.   
  
*  
  
It would not be the first time Will dreamed of some other, possible world. It would not be the first time his mind demanded that the universe reverse itself, that all teacups be made whole, that the pendulum would still. That a place be made the only way it could be. How long does a dream last?

The dreamer never knows.

*

Hannibal wears the ring around his neck for three more weeks before Will finally gives in.  
  
Hannibal is settled for the night, painkillers taken, bad leg elevated, book in his lap, almost painfully domestic. The ring is a warm glint at his throat. Will drops a manila folder down on the bed next to him. “What’s this?” Hannibal asks.  
  
Will draws back the comforter, and gets in beside him. He doesn’t need to look down at the folder; he has its contents memorized. “Timothy Murdoch. Forty-two, married, three kids. Healthy, as far as I can tell. Elementary school teacher. I’m also fairly convinced he’s the Las Cruces Strangler.”  
  
Hannibal says nothing, so Will continues. “We should wait until you’re out of the chair, but then I think I could manage most of it, physically. I’ll leave the presentation to you, and obviously the menu. Unless you’d rather see what I come up with.”

Hannibal tosses the folder to the foot of the bed, and in one clean movement he has Will by the throat, thumb digging into Will’s carotid. Will has half a second to gasp, head knocked back against the headboard, and then Hannibal is kissing him.

It’s not like any other first kiss Will’s had—it’s hard and mean, as though this is all Hannibal expects to get. Of course Will had known that Hannibal loved him, known that this might be something Hannibal would want. He’d been less certain of his own desires, but that hadn’t seemed to matter, before. He’s certain now that it matters even less, and kisses Hannibal back.  
  
Hannibal releases a very small sound into Will’s mouth, and his hand drops from Will’s throat to fold over the back of his neck. Will has to break away to breathe around the ring of bruises he’ll surely have in the morning, but Hannibal stays close, kissing the side of his open mouth, the line of his jaw. “Quiet,” Will manages, and turns them, so Hannibal is resting against the pillows and won’t strain either his side or his leg. “Quietly.” He draws Hannibal’s hand back up to his neck, bends over and kisses him with care, the way you kiss someone for the very first time. 

Hannibal is looking up at him with the very same expression he had when they killed the dragon. Will kisses him again for it, and again, until they’re making out like teenagers, Hannibal’s hands pressed to the small of his back, Will’s mouth swollen and strange. They don’t go any further, although he can feel Hannibal hard against his hip. This will be slow, Will thinks. Aching and indelible. He settles with his head on Hannibal’s chest, Hannibal’s head bent down over his. 

“You killed me,” Hannibal breathes into Will’s neck, eventually.  
  
“I did,” Will says. He can hear Hannibal’s heart beating, steady under his ribs.  
  
“And you love me,” Hannibal says.  
  
“I do,” Will agrees.  
  
Hannibal presses another kiss to the top of Will’s head. “First, Timothy Murdoch. But next, Bedelia. And after her, Alana Bloom.”  
  
“Not Alana,” Will says, and Hannibal gives a tired laugh.  
  
“You cannot keep drawing lines in the sand.”  
  
“I can,” Will says, letting his eyes drift close. “And you’ll let me, no matter the inconvenience.” 

There is a very long silence, and then a sigh. “Go to sleep, Will.”  
  
Will sleeps.  
  
*  
  
Elsewhere, Timothy Murdoch sleeps, as Bedelia du Maurier and Alana Bloom sleep. As Molly Graham sleeps with her son at her side, grief written in even her unconscious face. The moonlight falls on them all, marking each of them in the dark. It falls on Will, too, eyelids twitching as he dreams. They are all of them whole, all of them safe.  
  
This is enough for now.

**Author's Note:**

> The day after the finale: I google "can you hold onto someone if you fall from a great height", and get a bunch of results about people surviving horrifically long falls. You're likeliest to survive if you're young, if you're relaxed, if you are not sick or injured to begin with. A really awful thing occurs to me. That said, there was technically an engagement and a makeout scene in this fic, so don't kill me. (also the title etc comes from the love song of j alfred prufrock.)


End file.
